Scientist, Inventor, Mathematician and Gorgeous March 1, 2011

You would be forgiven for thinking this post is about Mrs. Peel. It is, however, about someone whose name is as well-known as hers is, at least by the Innocent Bystander crowd.

How about some clues:

This mystery person was a beautiful actress who was arrested for shoplifting twice.

She appeared nude in films and she was the co-inventor of Spread-Spectrum Frequency-hopping communications. I doubt that there was any correlation between those two events but you never know.

Her name was mentioned in Blazing Saddles.

In 2003, the Boeing corporation ran a series of recruitment ads featuring her as a woman of science.

In 2005, the first Inventors Day in German speaking countries was held in her honor on November 9.

The video game Half-Life has a few references to her.

A date with Her is one of the promises Audrey II tempts Seymour with in the musical Little Shop of Horrors.

The 2010 New York Public Library’s exhibit: “Thirty Years of Photography at the New York Public Library” includes a photo of her, topless.

For several years during the 1990s, the boxes of the current CorelDRAW software suites were graced by a large Corel-drawn image of her in tribute to her pre-computer scientific discoveries.

Her frequency-hopping idea serves as a basis for modern “Spread spectrum” communication technology, such as “COFDM” used in Wi-Fi network connections and “CDMA” used in some cordless and wireless telephones.

She has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

She enjoyed her biggest success as Delilah in Cecil B. DeMille’s (1949 film) Samson and Delilah, the highest-grossing film of 1949, with Victor Mature as the Biblical strongman.

Some of you have guessed her identity by now.

Yep, it’s Hedy Lamarr. – I bet you didn’t know all that stuff about her.

What did you expect? “Welcome, sonny”? “Make yourself at home”? “Marry my daughter”? You’ve got to remember that these are just simple farmers. These are people of the land. The common clay of the new West. You know…

You just know Tommy Chong is baffled and probably more than a little pissed about Charlie Sheen. Chong’s house was raided and he was thrown in jail for pot & paraphernalia, while Sheen openly brags about his drug use and is known to have at least at one time a suitcase full of cocaine! And he’s doing it at home, with kids around. I guess he has to do a line of blow right in front of a cop before they do anything about it.